Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
though he found himself back pacing Paris’s streets, working for
the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), after a
period teaching in the provinces. 1 At CNRS, Lefebvre focused on
the peasant question, conducting research on agricultural reform
in France, Italy, and Eastern Europe and on “primitive accumulation”
of capital, as well as on the rural rent issues that Marx
left dangling in Volume 3 of Capital. Lefebvre always felt that
the peasantry figured prominently in socialist history; Mao’s 1949
revolution in China offered dramatic confirmation. (The French
Communist Party, though, was less impressed with poor Lefebvre’s
peasant labors. Rural rent, they scoffed, was a Ricardian problematic
not a Marxist one!)
An even more amazing aspect of Lefebvre’s notion of everyday
life, one overlooked by many commentators, is that it germinated
when everybody’s daily life, Lefebvre’s included, was
about to be blown to smithereens. Therein lies its most fundamental
message: everyday life is so precious because it is so fragile;
we must live it to the full, inhabit it as fully sensual beings, as
total men and women, commandeering our own very finite destiny,
before it’s too late. The life and death everyday drama for
Lefebvre really began in December 1940, when he quit his teaching
post as “a little prof de philo in a little provincial collège”
(high school) at Montargis, one hundred kilometers south of Paris,
and accepted another at Saint-Étienne, further south in the Loire. 2
Married with four kids, Lefebvre’s already fraught personal situation
soon worsened when the pro-Nazi Vichy government began
purging public offices, schools, and colleges of Jews, Freemasons,
and Communist Party members. Too old to be drafted, without job
or means, the almost fortysomething philosopher fled to Aix-en-
Provence, where he joined the Resistance Movement and lived in
a tiny house a few kilometers out of town. In winter, it was freezing
cold. For fuel he burned wood that created more fumes than
2